Bashara’s Uneventful Visit Part 2.

(I like Bashara, always have.  This story explains a bit of her backstory. )

“Get off of me,” growled Bashara as she left the moron there and tried to reconcile what just happened in the Golden Badger’s dining hall.  Somehow, despite everything she had not managed to ensnare Jim with her Mental Magic.  She was unsuccessful and now she had to worry about what the boss was going to do to her when she reported that failure.

She was covered in fish guts and quite done with everything.  Badgelor nuzzled into her midsection and started sucking the fish stew off of her dress, pulling out several stitches of embroidery.

Not that it mattered, the dress was sodden with the pathetic crap the locals ate.

“This was a nice dress,” she hissed, throwing open the door to her room and shuffling in as she carried the stupid badger in her arms.  She wanted to throw him down, but instead she sat with him on her lap and considered her options.

Could Jim be one of the rare individuals who was resistant against Mental Magic?  That would certainly screw up her plans, but how likely was that?  Any of the Mental Resistance skills were so rare that even the boss didn’t possess all of them, though she possessed more than enough to prevent Bashara from getting any ideas.

No, he was just lucky and she picked a bad spot.  She knew she needed to get him alone, but he was a moron and they were in a podunk town.  This wasn’t the court at Falcon, or the Castle of Lions, this was what was left of Windfall.

She would just have to try again, figure out some plan to get him alone and then use her magic to mentally overwrite the idiot.  She would turn him into another simpering fool, just for his gall at pretending to be Mayor.

It was that stupid girl, she screwed the plan over more than anyone else.  Bashara considered what horrible fate she could cause to poor Jarra the Healer.  That was easy, Bashara would use her magic to have the poor girl put poison herbs in all of her potions.  The <system> would track the damage down to Jarra, and the Barrier would do the rest and the fool girl would die screaming in a fire.

She scratched the badger under his chin, smiling contentedly.

Badgelor was unconscious, so she sat him gently on her night stand and disrobed.  The dress was ruined, the fish sauce that this place used thoroughly stained the embroidery.  She examined the dress and sighed, it was a newer Falconian one that showed off her figure.  Glancing at the mirror revealed her figure could use the help.

Away the dress went into her dimensional storage, she might be able to use it for something later.  Her mother might even have an alchemical potion that could restore the thing if Bashara was lucky, and begged just right.

Mother and the boss were the same, of course, she just mentally separated the two because one might forgive her shortcomings, the other was just disappointed in her all the time.  Bashara never knew why the boss hated her so, but sometimes there were glints of genuine respect there, buried in the condescension.  For some reason, her mother was never actually happy with anything she did and Bashara never figured out why.

Bashara wondered what her father would have thought.  He was probably some rich nobel that the boss seduced in one of her schemes.  She imagined he was a wizard, though all her teaching at Zentarim didn’t find him.

She smiled fondly, remembering Ithaca and her adventures trying to find her father.  He was half convinced it must have been Professor Badgington, though that didn’t make much sense to Bashara.  Mother hated that man.  Then again, maybe that was why?

It was just as likely that her father was a Falconian nobel.  Probably the King, given how closely she resembled Julia.  There was a strong family resemblance there, but the king only had one child.  She checked.  Going further down the family tree to one of the other major branches would have taken her more time than she was willing to invest in this fool's errand.

Plus so many of the Falconian high nobility died in their petty games.  If her father was out of one of the lesser branches, he was most likely dead now.  She should know, she killed a few herself.  They were fighting a constant, low level civil war every few years trying to gain ratings.  As a non-Falconian, Bashara still wasn’t quite sure what those were but she was positive more people had died in the pursuit of higher ratings than anyone realized.

Badgelor stirred so she picked him back up and threw him over her shoulder, like a baby who needed burping.

She ran her finger against the wood of her bed and frowned.  It was provincial quality at best, not the finery she was used to.  Nothing in this room could have been made by anyone more than a Journeyman at the respective skills.

That was fine for the common folk, but she missed her Master ranked sheets.  They actually made you cleaner while you slept and everything in this godsforsaken town was just dirty.

The state of the world was the boss's fault.  Her plan was ambitious as it was insane, and perhaps that’s why Bashara liked it so much.  After all, it wasn’t often that someone with the king of power that the boss possessed seriously considered something like…

Badgelor burped loudly, and Bashara patted him on the back.

The boss hated war badgers, and she knew she should kill this one.  She had some war badger poison in her traveling pack, she could mix it into the stew.  Then the badger snuggled in more and she scratched his ears again.

This was all a waste of time.  She really needed to get back into the riverlands and search for that final dungeon.  It was the only one on the list she really thought could have the target inside.

The boss scoured the Windfall dungeon years ago.  Was it years?  The boss went through the dungeon shortly after the passing of Grebthar.  She destroyed the castle in her fury of not finding what she was looking for.  Bashara tried to remember how long ago that was and failed.  Everything muddled together.  That was a problem, so she kept notes.

She pulled the old, dog eared piece of paper out of her storage and looked at it.  She couldn’t trust the <system>, not here.  She needed to have a physical copy of what she did and the fact that she was confident that it was something she had physically written disturbed her most.  There were dungeons all over the world that were marked as visited in her hand, despite the fact that she knew she had not been to most of them.  She couldn’t have possibly been there, some were destroyed, others were across the world.   Yet, when she looked at each dungeon she marked off, she could remember the place.

Like she’d actually been there.

Bashara shook it off and looked into the mirror, and her scar.  She tried to remember how she got that wound, but she could never remember.  Worse, she seemed to remember it being in different places so every time she saw her reflection she saw a different version of herself.

In her dreams the scar moved.  Sometimes it was on her left cheek, other times the right.  Sometimes it was up and down, others it ran along her cheekbone.  Sometimes it was across her eye, others it was down her chin.  She remembered so many scars, but she only had one.  Bashara wanted that scar gone, but she wasn’t allowed to fix it.

Couldn’t fix it.

No healing magic could correct the scar, and that meant there was a powerful curse there.  A curse she didn’t understand.  It was probably tied to all of her memory loss, and the boss wasn’t telling her how she got it.  That scar kept her under her mother’s thumb, the boss’s thumb, and she had no means of correcting that issue.

She scratched the badger under the chin.

“Why am I here?” she grunted.  She wanted to escape somewhere, on an adventure.  Maybe she could run into Professor Badgington.  She almost found him once, but that was years ago.  He smelled safe.  He would understand her at least, but the boss wouldn’t approve.

The professor had ruined way too many of their plans for the boss to ever forgive him.  He was one of the four or five people in all the world that she wanted to personally kill, which was sad.  Bashara had fond memories of several people the boss hated.

But at least one of those people died a century ago, and Bashrara remembered having tea with her.  She remembered a lovely morning where they smiled and talked the morning away, until the poison worked at least.

Her heart beat faster as the image of a skull faced demon taking her down into Jersey rushed into her mind.  She remembered her soul being placed into a machine and all of her experience points being torn away, leaving her only with her memories.  Then, the nightmare ended and she was in her room with mother reading to her again.

Bashara knew she was crazy, she was as crazy as long as she could remember.  She wandered the land looking for the target and every single place she’d been felt like a place she’d visited before.  Except every time she got there the place looked worse, crappier.  Falling apart.

The whole world was falling apart, and she had a front row seat.

Except Windfall, of course.  She remembered what Windfall looked like from the stories she was told by her mother.  Every morning when she was little, her mother would tell stories of this place.  The broad squares with markets inside them.  The shops selling goods here and there. Everything was so perfect, and the Mayor was so perfect.

Mom gushed about the Mayor for hours, it was the only way to distract her from your failures.  The Mayor was perfect, everything he touched was perfect, everything he did was perfect.

Bashara looked back at her scar and hated it.  She was supposed to be perfect, and she wasn’t.  So nothing else could be either.  She wanted to burn Windfall to the ground.  Barashara just imagined what she would do if she found the real Mayor, maybe Jim too.

She scratched Badgelor under the chin and felt a single tear form at the corner of her eye.

It was late and nothing more could be made for the plan today.  It was time for sleep.  She considered throwing the sleeping badger out of the window, but stopped herself.  He would just come back and be more upset than before.

At least, that’s what she told herself as crawled into bed and placed her face into his fluffy back.  For some reason, she felt safe.